The Internet, peer-reviewed

It could be one of the most important innovations on the Internet since the browser.

Imagine an open-source, crowd-sourced, community-moderated, distributed platform for sentence-level annotation of the Web. In other words, a way to cut through the babble and restore some sanity and trust.

That’s the idea behind Hypothes.is. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more — without requiring participation of the underlying site.

It’s based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O’Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.

“If what is published is immediately fact and logic-checked, in a detailed and highly visible way, it will necessarily put pressure upstream to the point of authorship,” says the FAQ. “In order to accomplish this we need better feedback mechanisms. Standard comments just aren’t up to the task, and neither are newer systems such as Disqus, IntenseDebate, Facebook Comments or others. While interesting, none of them fundamentally change the comment model. It’s time for a new set of tools.”

Yes, it’s been tried before, and didn’t catch on. But looking at the solid concept and the names involved, I believe they can pull it off.

I just donated to their Kickstarter fund. I recommend you do the same. (You might also want to reserve your user name.)

Comments (9)

If Hypothes.is successfully builds the complete architecture, i.e., the human capital, software, participation systems, storage and security, and creates worldwide appeal for training and usage, perhaps the peace camp will finally save the world a lot of pain and misery. The recent fellowship focused on the best usage case and it would be nice to see the plug-in applied to voting and elections. This would be a great start to upend the established modus operandi and give it over due Open Space.

I think it’s a wonderful idea! Internet has become an enormous mess, where you find the worst and the best just side by side (but more the former).
I really hope that this project will succeed.
Try writing about it in all forums, tweet that, and share it… It could be an invention who could make the internet more wikipedia-like! Lastly

This has me very interested. I would absolutely love the sorts of functions this would bring. I’m not sure how readily people will want to adopt it though. I suppose as long as it doesn’t interfere with the millions of trivial comments most people seem to enjoy making, then hopefully it will catch on. For people who like substantial discussion, this could indeed make the internet into the billion-way hub of rational discourse that we had hoped it would become, beyond just the niche sites that specifically for it.

Youtube comments with such a peer reviewed system? I will have died and gone to intellectual nirvana. I very, very much hope this takes off, I will fall in love with the internet all over again (it may have been a naivety of mine, to have not suspected all along that I would fall for it over and over as it evolves).